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Has Oracle been a disaster for Sun’s open source?

Companies based around open source are still comparatively young. So it remains an open question what happens to them in the long term. As open source becomes more widely accepted, an obvious growth path for them is to be bought by a bigger, traditional software company. The concern then becomes: how does the underlying open source code fare in those circumstances?

The first large-scale test-case was Sun buying MySQL. But that experiment was soon curtailed – and trumped – when Oracle bought Sun. Naturally, this prompted much hand-wringing over whether Oracle would nurture the open source projects that Sun was running – and whether it was even capable of understanding the free software culture. That was over a year ago, so it’s maybe time to see how things are working out.